It could be argued that template-style exploitable memes are the bread-and-butter of image board communities like those found on 4chan. Taking a popular, strange, or funny image and editing it down to the simplest components allows them to be photoshopped into a variety of contexts. It's easy and allows for a wide range of iterations, many of which gesture back to previous memes to construct intricate networks of reference that require elaborate explanations and complex genealogies to decipher. Some of the most popular template memes come from 4chan's Cartoons and Comics board /co/, and usually involve stripping a drawn image to it's most basic outlines so that it can be adapted to various popular cartoon or comic characters. Popular examples include Optimized Gif Dude (2006), Gentlemen (2006), fsjal (2008), and X Everywhere (2010).

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[The Original Image]

Handsome Face is a image that first appeared in mid-September of 2010 on /co/ and was quickly made a template by 4chan user Shore Leave !!T2UdrWkLSWB. This original image is taken from a scene from the 2010 animated film Superman/Batman: Apocalypse. The face was generally regarded as "handsome" in a way that seemed comical and overly sincere, as though he were about to say something heartfelt to another character. Soon it was coupled with the text template "X, I . . ." where X is a character, concept, or object that could be humorously paired with the original. An iteration using the Joker might be captioned "Batman, I . . .", or one made to look like Shaggy from the group Insane Clown Posse might be captioned "Magnets, I . . ." in reference to the much-parodied ICP music video Miracles (2009).

[The Template]

The meme points to the complex network of reference that makes up the template format, as well as the call-and-response solicitation that helps to propagate ...

Evelien Lohbeck’s multimedia artwork noteboek (2008), has been selected as a Top Video in the Biennial of Creative Video, the showcase organized by the Guggenheim Museum and YouTube. 1Noteboek exemplifies what I call ‘reversed remediation’. 2 This aesthetic strategy subverts Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s notion of ‘remediation,’ which serves a historical desire for immediacy.3 Countering Marshall McLuhan’s fear of the narcotic state that the user of a medium can enter when becoming a closed system with the medium; reversed remediation offers a chance to wake up the viewer. 4 It creates a state of critical awareness about how media shape one’s perception of the world. (Art)works that employ reversed remediation destabilize remediation mechanisms, by making media visible instead of transparent. It makes critical awareness possible because it lays bare the workings of media instead of obfuscating them. The following discussion distinguishes between the theories of remediation and reversed remediation and applies this theoretical foundation to Lohbeck’s noteboek.

Sound recordings from three glaciers in Iceland, pressed into three records, cast, and frozen with the meltwater from each of these glaciers, and played on three turntables until they completely melt. The records were played once and now exist as three digital films. The turntables begin playing together, and for the first ten minutes as the needles trace their way around, the sounds from each glacier merge in and out with the sounds the ice itself creates. The needle catches on the last loop, and the records play for nearly two hours, until completely melted.

Marina Abramović, view of The Artist is Present at the MoMA. Photo: C-Monster.

Inevitably, the fast pace of consumerism is accompanied by the tantalizing promise of slow time—Allen Ginsberg once complained of a heart attack en route to his weekly meditation.

Just as the arts were reinvented in the age of the camera, so too must they be in the age of accelerated time. If the internet and the touch screen represent the apparatuses of our age, then the material and the prolonged have become a niche for the discursive and formal role of the arts. Much like a spa, the arts play host to a malnourished subject eager to experience something nostalgically other. Slow time and tangible bodies become so rare experientially that their aesthetic value finds a home in the cul-de-sac of scarcity that is art.

Since the advent of mechanical production, the arts have been the space in which the hard-to-find seeks refuge. And while the art market has been much discussed, we now find another form of scarcity in forms of experience. At times in tension, at times in collusion with capitalist scarcity, the scarcity of experience encourages forms of art that are not as easily distributed as—and thus more distinguishable from—the mass produced goods of the broader market. Massive installations, sculptures, performance, civic institutions (the museum), time-based relational aesthetics all find value in their experiential distinction from larger markets. Museums offer special opportunities to experience the body in space. In this spasmodic era, we find the arts recalibrated as a temporal, spatial, and bodily escape.

This kind of shifted aesthetic disposition resists not only the pace of the information economy, but, perhaps more importantly, our very ability to consume our experience. If we are frantic, it is only because we need to ...

DIS Magazine will host a talk in conjunction with the exhibition "Free" on Sunday at 3pm, information below:

The first in a series of lectures organized by the fashion, art and commerce magazine DIS, Elastic Youth: Interpreting the Scrunchie, David Riley offers an in-depth analysis of the controversial hair accessory. Drawing on patent documents, fashion, and pop culture, he traces its history from mass marketed phenomenon to object of derision among the fashion elite. David Riley is an artist and musician living in NYC, known for his involvement with the band Mirror Mirror and the collaborative group The Society for the Advancement of Inflammatory Consciousness. He has exhibited and/or performed at The Kitchen, Momenta, John Connelly Presents, Klaus von Nichtssagend, Andrew Edlin, Audio Visual Arts (AVA) and Index Art Center, as well as venues around the US and Europe.

Collaborators of Lizzie Fitch, a featured artist in “Free,” DIS Magazine are a fashion, art and commerce publication that seeks to expand creative economies. Beyond reporting the popular surfaces of culture, DIS materializes and projects contemporary identity poetics and politics. DIS is currently available in digital form at dismagazine.com. DIS is, collectively: Lauren Boyle, Solomon Chase, S. Adrian Massey III, Marco Roso, Patrik Sandberg, Nicholas Scholl, and David Toro.

Last Friday, I popped by Spencer Brownstone Gallery for B.Y.O.B. or Bring Your Own Beamer, a one-night-only exhibition organized by artist Rafaël Rozendaal. Artists were invited to bring their own projector (or "beamer" in European parlance) and project whatever they wish - videos, animated gifs, live streams, etc. Despite some problems with electricity and short-circuiting at the space - apparently 30+ projectors and laptops all running simultaneously tested the gallery's supply - the show was a hit and very fun. My favorite work was the live lobsters in a fish tank in the back room by Hayley Silverman and Charles Broskoski. A clip lamp "projected" the tank onto the wall behind it, so it was a creative interpretation of the show's theme. I think they even named them too - Tootsie? Wootsie? I can't remember. Anyway, here are some shots from last Friday. If you live in Los Angeles, lucky you, they'll be organizing another BYOB this coming week on November 19th at USC Gayle and Ed Roski MFA Gallery, info here.